Citation Needed - Pluto

Episode Date: August 6, 2025

Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is made primarily of ice and rock and is much smaller than the inner planets. Pluto has roughly one-sixth the mass of the Moon and one-third its volume. Originally considered a planet, its classification was changed when astronomers adopted a new definition of planet.

Hello and welcome, citation needed, podcast where you choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'm joined by four heavenly bodies who all spend plenty of time on the elliptical. Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli. All right, the only thing heavenly about my body is that it's high. I used to use the ellipticals at Planet Fitness, but now it's just fitness.

Nicely done. Nicely done. They told me I had to stop yelling, We on the machines, but I told them that was the whole point. Yeah, no. All right. Noah, what person placed thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? What are we going to be talking about today?

Pluto. Excellent. So what is Pluto? It's the largest dwarf planet in the solar system, and it's my vote for the cutest of the known heavenly bodies. It's the ninth largest, but only 10th most massive object that directly orbits the sun. It has five known moons, a 248-year, periodicity, a highly elliptical orbit, and, though it doesn't have an actual heart,

it has something similar enough to that that it would be illegal to abort it in Texas. A gun. Okay. Greg Abbott just put a bounty on all of us. This is not right. Right. Because, all right, the first thing that we have to talk about is this whiny-ass thing people do where they try to insist that Pluto is still a planet.

So, with all two apologies, right to all these misguided Pluto lovers, hey guys, you're loving Pluto wrong. It's not that it used to be a planet and it got demoted. It's that it was misidentified in 1930 and it took a 76 years to admit it. Right? Like if you see Cecil from across the room and you're like

why that's rock and roll legend Dave Grohl. But then upon getting a closer look you realize that it's Cecil Cecil didn't get demoted to be in fucking Cecil. He was Cecil the whole time you just misidentified him. No. No. No. Noah. It's like I spent my

childhood being told to remember that Cecil is Dave Grohl. And then I was taught mnemonics, like my very educated mother just served us nine Cecil's. And then some science nerd was like, oops, sorry, whoopsie, changed me a world view. No, you change the definition

of planet, you nerd. No, logical, new, now Ploto isn't a sneeze gnaw or whatever new word. You have to use, because you told me to learn it. Okay, Dave Grohl got upgraded to Cecil. That's what fucking happened. Right. All right. So, but here's, okay, here's the problem with that, Eli. And to explain it, I need to stick with the Dave Grohl analogy a little bit longer. Because look, I love Cecil to death. I'd give a kidney for the guy. Not one of mine, but I'd get one. I have ways. Thank you for your wishful resourcefulness. No, I appreciate it. If you want one, let me know. This is not really restricted to medical emergencies. I got a guy. And Cecil is genuinely one of the coolest guys I know. But he's not fucking rock star cool.

Right? And if you think he's a rock star... Whatever. But if you think he's a rock star and you start comparing him in coolness to all the other rockstar, he's going to come up short, right? He'll be the least impressive rock star. But once you realize your mistake and you place him in his proper category, say, guys name Cecil or people who regularly listen to Joe Rogan, he suddenly skyrockets to the top of the cool rankings.

That's what happened to Pluto. Hey, Cecil, I'm sorry. Noah couldn't possibly explain how Pluto's not a planet without spending a paragraph on how lame you are. It wasn't about how cool he wasn't. Noah, you could just say, hey, welcome back, Cecil. These other guys are miserable and never laugh at anything. That's okay, too.

Hey, come, Tom does. It's true. Eli, did you want to laugh real quick? or no. You ever catch one of Eli's like sad boy laughs where he's like, me,

meow. You have to edit it out because it just sounds terrifying. You do. Because it sounds mean. It sounds mean. Yes. Yeah.

All right. So, so yeah, but it was never a fucking planet. And what's more, that's been very obvious for quite a while. The first hint was that it

crosses the orbit of a fucking planet. It's also significant. smaller than our moon. And if those weren't clues enough, and they were, in 1992, we discovered a second object following Pluto's same basic orbit and another in 1993. But before we would reclassify Pluto, we would have to discover 42 more. And today we know about something like 3,000 of them. Right. So the point is that I remember having conversations with my brother about how planetary Pluto wasn't when I was 10. When the writers of the Jim Carrey comedy, me, myself and Irene, needed a convenient conversation for super geniuses to be having.

They went with, it's silly to call Pluto a planet. That movie came out in 2000, and it was already a tired cliche by then. Yeah, and remember, if you can't trust Jim Carrey, well, okay, you can't trust Jim Carrey. Seriously, Jim Carrey's a fucking idiot. We're a mask. I don't even think they work, but we're a mask. In fact, and I find this really interesting, Pluto is not even the first misidentified non-planet to get this treatment, right?

So on New Year's Eve of 1801, a Sicilian astronomer named JEPI-Piaz discovered a world nestled between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. He announced that he'd discovered what would have then been the eighth known planet. He named it series,

and it was pretty big, right? Like more than a third as big as Pluto, at least. But a few decades later, we started finding other shit that shared its orbit. We reclassified it as an asteroid, which was not a previously known thing. And we made Series the king of the asteroid.

belt. Pretty much exactly what happened to Pluto, only now is the Kuiper belt instead of the asteroid belt. Kuiper belt sounds like an old-timey abandoned Jewish slur that Grop just rediscovered. It's just calling everyone from MSNBC at all of a sudden, yeah.

Shut up, Kiper Belt. Hey, Grock, thanks again for the recipe for, let's see, potato and leaked soup. But do I absolutely have to heat it with the space lasers? Is that? No, of course. That leaves the question of why it took so long for astronomers to officially reclassify Pluto.

And I guess there's no consensus on this, but I think it's worth noting that the last people who were willing to admit that Ceres wasn't an actual planet were Sicilians. And Pluto is the only so-called planet that was discovered in America. And of course, unlike Sicily, America A had an outsized influence in the larger world of astronomy during this whole period. And B, didn't have a historical, oh, well, like Archimedes to fall back on when we lost our only planet. Right. So if you think about it, people who continue to insist that Pluto should be classified as a planet are being kind of nationalist, right? Like, I mean, what else could it be if he fucks up your mnemonic? Well, hey, maybe it's time you got your own fucking pizza. Your mother, after all, is very elderly. I don't know why we've been pushing all the pizza fetching on her this whole time anyway. Some of our moms love us, Noah. Okay. I learned it from Screech on Saved by the Bell as Mvimj Sund. So now it's just Vemge, son. Much easier. Okay, so now that I've definitively settled the debate about Pluto's planethood,

let's rewind the story to the year 1930. The biggest movie in theaters was all quiet on the Western front. The Lindy Hop was the dance of the day. And the most popular thing on television was oscilloscope waveforms, because commercial television broadcast wouldn't begin until 1941. And it was the tail end of what is certainly the most, technologically whipsawing half century in human history, right? A person turning 50 in 1930 would have watched airplanes, cars, movies, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, and broadcast radio come into existence.

Just imagine how busy the Tom of that era had to be. Oh, you hear that Tom? You could have just been afraid of things that go vroom. All right. Jokes on you. I am afraid of things that goes out. That's true. That's fair.

so but the 1930s came things that make you go through yes I was singing that moment I was too I was too so yes so okay so the 1930s came

at a time of rapid astronomical discovery as well so consider this for all the human history we had seven known heavenly bodies eight if you count earth

but oddly enough we wouldn't discover that one until later so seven bodies for 300,000 years or so and once we add earth we subtract the sun from it so that changes in

1600 when Jupiter gets a few moons and Saturn gets a few more. In the 1700s, we get a whole new planet in the form of Uranus. It's got two moons plus Saturn gets two more. By the 1800s, it's getting downright crowded. We get an eighth planet that isn't a planet in series. We get an eighth planet that is a planet in Neptune. It gets a moon. Uranus gets two more. Jupiter gets another one. Saturn gets two more. That ostentatious fuck. And even Mars gets in on the action with two little moonlets of its own. And by the time we get to 1900, Jupiter has already racked up four more moons bringing its total to nine. Okay. I do not know how to break this to you, Noah. But for an essay about Pluto, you were spending very little time on cartoon dogs. He's building. He's building. It's all right

to leave a note here and there. That's fine. So, of course, once astronomers had that many heavenly I didn't want to fucking hear about goofy. So, all right. So once astronomers had, that many heavenly bodies to work with, they could start doing way more intricate math with regards to the interactions of these various worlds. And one of the things they discovered when they did all of this math was that two of the planets weren't

moving quite right. Both Uranus and Neptune... Carry the four. God damn. But it turned out that both Uranus and Neptune, the most distant known planets, seemed to be getting tugged by another gravitational force. So this

led scientists to speculate that there was at least one more. So this led scientists to speculate that there was at least one more planet yet to find. And, of course, this touched off a race to see who could be the first to find it. Yeah, modern toddler parents play this game in the form of,

did someone fart or did the baby shit itself? It's like that for astronomy. Right, exactly. Oh, no, dad shit himself. That's a new one. Put that on the board. That's just in my house. It's crazy you haven't had kids.

It makes no sense. Now, it's worth pointing out that this idea of using Newtonian mechanics to sort out where a planet should be, that wasn't new. That's how we found Neptune. In 1840, a French astronomer named Urbane Laverier crunched the numbers on Uranus's orbit. He figured out not only that there was another planet tugging on it, but where that planet was. Now, telescopes of the day could barely make out the fate glow of Neptune back then. So it would take another six years in a German guy to actually find it. but Varia gets a huge amount of the credit

for telling him where it would be. Figuring out stuff by the absence of stuff. It's like the Panama Papers, journalists, except this person lived. Okay, makes sense. Yeah, same as how we know about Hillary eating all those babies. Like, if she didn't eat them, where are they?

Where are those people? Right, she ate the whole fucking, ate the whole fucking basement, yeah. But even after we found Neptune and we factored that in, there were still some perturbations in Uranus's orbit that didn't make sense. so astronomers went looking for a ninth big-ass planet

but what they were actually seeing were the anomalies caused by 3,000 plus relatively small objects so needless to say their math was off. In fact, Pluto was observed and documented more than a dozen times before anybody realized what the fuck it was. The wiki calls these observations pre-coveries which is, yeah, it's the kind of word

you've got to make up if you're a culture that wants to venerate Christopher Columbus, I guess. It's not our fault. Pluto is so pretty. Precoverry is a compliment, if you think about it. Okay, guys, when a man makes a juvenile joke like that, it's because he hasn't grown up yet. One can even say he's a bit premature.

Now, of course, astronomers all over the world were looking for this bonus planet, but the man leading the search was American businessman and Martian Canal enthusiast, Percival Lowell. He was determined to find that elusive extra planet, and he sort of did. He was among the pre-coverers that snapped photos of it without realizing it, realizing that that's what they were looking at anyway. But he would die before the mystery could be solved.

Now, after he died, his wife and his very famous observatory got into a decade-long legal battle that ground the search to a halt. But when it was picked back up in 1929, the director handed the job to a 23-year-old astronomer that had just started at the observatory. His name was Clyde Tombaugh, and apparently he got the job because the boss was impressed with a couple of pictures that the kid. Drew. That was his primary qualification for a spot in astronomical history. Yeah, that's weird, because Clyde says he never wrote a picture in his entire life. Interesting. We'll see what happens after a quick break. Because twisting. the knob forward means zoom in.

It's the way your eyes are going. Okay, but back is more realistic to the thing the telescope is doing internally. I don't care what it's doing internally. Oh, fellas. Oh, wow. Chris, hey, you're back. Cool.

Dude, we're so glad to see you. That's fellas. Recovery hasn't been loosal, but I'm here. Yeah, yeah, you are. And again, we are. So, so sorry about Debbie. Yeah, we were all so sad when we heard. Yeah, she was my angel.

No, of course. Well, hey, hey, guys, while I was having a downtime, I think I found the new planet. Oh, the one that Leverier found? Yeah, that's the one, gentlemen. Let me introduce you to Ludo. Oh, wow. it looks kind of small

like really small I know we must spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out its mysteries well sure it's just dude what man it's not a planet he said not planned

for you to find the planet but you did you found it seriously are we gonna just and I named Pluto for the god of the underworld

who currently holds my sweet, sweet Debbie and his embrace. Right. Because she got squirched between those two trucks in front of me. Yeah. Sorry, you're saying? I was saying, are we going to celebrate her? Why, man? Because you found a new planet.

To Debbie. Take Debbie. She got squished so, but. We know, man. We know. This message is sponsored by Racon. I'm going to shoot you in the chest with a harpoon gun. And I will help him. Hey guys, what's the matter?

Eli is saying that sequels are better than the originals. I mean, guys, have you seen Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice? Look, guys, he's wrong about movies, but he's got a point when it comes to Raycon Wireless Earbuds. That's right. The latest version of Raycon's everyday earbuds classic now features active noise cancellation. The one thing they were missing. That was the one thing they were missing. Pair that with eight hours of playtime and 32-hour battery.

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sponsored by Raycon. Ghostbusters, too. Three votes for the harpoon. Don't! All right, guys. You ready to record the rest of the podcast? All right. Yeah.

Hey, what happened to Eli? Oh, he's earning lunch. earning like with money no no he's been trying to eat healthier lately but since he doesn't have time to cook or prep easy meals he just runs downstairs and then runs back up before he eats lunch every day yeah runs all the way we're on the 24th floor yeah yeah it uh it takes a while well why doesn't he just try factor oh what's factor between busy schedules and summer plans and sometimes all I've got is a couple of minutes. Factor helps me eat smarter with tasty chef-prepared meals

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Do you think people, do you think people check to see if the podcast was paused by accident? I bet they did. Oh, my throat. Okay, what about Taskmaster? Is that porn? No, it's comedy. Okay, well, it sounds like porn.

Hey, guys, what's up? I'm trying to convince Tom to use a VPN for his Netflix. Oh, dude, are you not using a VPN for Netflix? You have to. Why? I don't even know what a VPN does. VPN, Tom. Netflix has more than 18,000 titles globally, but only like, 7,000 of those are available in the U.S.

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ExpressVPN works on all your devices, phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, and more. I don't know, Noah. Have they actually used it? I sure have. ExpressVPN keeps me up to date on all my favorite British TV shows like Taskmaster, Great British Bake Off, and much, much more. That's why I know illusions personally endorse ExpressVPN. All right.

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No one. Thanks, man. I wonder what I should watch first. Batman, the animated series. Is that one porn? I mean, it depends on who you ask.

See? And we're back. When we left off, what is Pluto? I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Okay. So getting to discover the new planet gig, it seems like a pretty awesome job for the new guy,

but that's only because we know he succeeds. This is something that Percival Lull, who despite being a, a bit of a crank was also a fucking legend in observational astronomy was unable to do after years of effort. So the actual job he was being handed was look at pairs of photographs over and over again and see if there are any ever so slight differences in them. That's how you find shit that isn't a star. Star move with the rotation of the Earth. So anything that isn't moving exactly as the stars are moving is something local. It's a planet or an asteroid or a dwarf planet,

whatever. But Pluto, in addition to being really small and really far away, is also moving really slowly, so slowly that it won't get back to the place it was when Tombaugh first found it until March 23rd of 2178. So this kid was looking for the faintest discernible light moving the faintest imaginable distance.

And he found it. It's like if your job was to find the difference between the two drawings that are in the newspaper next to the junior jumble where the difference is like one fish has an extra scale. Corporate needs you to find the differences between this grainy dot and this grainy dot. Right.

That's the same picture. So it took nearly a year, but on February 18th, he's sitting at this device called a no-shit blink comparator, which you used to compare images in the blink of an eye. And he notices a tiny non-cedereal movement from like fucking six photons worth of a light source. It takes him almost a full month to double check all these other photos and confirm it. But on March 13th, he calls Harvard College Obseratorial. and tells them it's time to update their textbooks. So shortly thereafter, the world was a buzz with new planet fever.

This wasn't the first new planet to be discovered, of course, but it was the first American one, dammit, and it was also the first one to be discovered in the age of mass media. So the Lowell Observatory is immediately swamped with name ideas for the new world. The top three suggestions were Minerva, Kronus, and Pluto. So they went with the least cool of those three. Apparently Minerva was already taken There's an asteroid named Minerva and Kronus was rejected

Because the guy championing that name Was an asshole that nobody liked We can go with Kronus who like ate his own kids Also fucking Kyle wants that one Or we can do the Underworld guy I'm saying Underroad guy Yeah Honestly he's enough of an asshole

That it's a good thing we didn't let him name a planet And for what it's worth It's not a planet Thank you. Thank you. What kind of asshole would say? Oh, you're on my side now. But for what it's worth, Pluto was a pretty solid name. First of all, five of Saturn's six surviving kids already had heavenly bodies named after

them, Jupiter, Neptune, series, Juno, and Vesta. So it seemed like the least we could do. Plus, Pluto was the god of an inhospitable underworld. And Pluto had that kind of shit going for it, like a few other places in the solar system. It's also, and this seems stupid now, but the search for the, the ninth planet was so heavily associated with the beloved Percival Lull that the fact that Pluto started with his initials probably genuinely factored into the name. But for whatever reason, the observatory submitted their suggested name to both the American Astronomical Society

and the Royal Astronomical Society. Both groups approved it unanimously. And on May 1st of 1930, Pluto was officially chrissive. I'm glad they agreed. Otherwise, we'd have an aluminum Aluminium situation. Yeah, wait until you hear an essay about Neptune, dude. So, okay, now, of course, we knew almost nothing about it, right? We could work at its orbit, its distance,

and its approximate mass from the observations that the Lowell Observatory made, and all the more so once every high-powered telescope the world was suddenly turning its way. But that's all we could really figure out until telescope technology improved. Okay, hey, I know we're not going to know for sure until we get like a better look at it,

but it's bound to be, you know, cold, lifeless, and dry, or sure we don't want to call this a Shapiro? So, okay, so the first big info dump on Pluto would come in 1978 when we discovered the largest of Pluto satellites, the moon Charon. And Charon is actually pretty interesting in its own right. It is by far the largest moon relative to the world it's orbiting, right? It's like it's more than half of the size of Pluto, which is so big that their shared

center of gravity is outside. of Pluto, meaning like no one object actually orbits the other. The two objects orbit a shared center based on their relative masses. That center is called a berry center, but on Earth, our moon is small enough that the berry center is well within our planet. It's like 3,000 miles or 4,600 kilometers from the Earth center, but that's still well within the planet. And compared to other planet moon systems, our moon is fucking huge. But with Pluto, the Berry Center is about 600 miles or 960 kilometers or so

above the planet's surface which is fucking nuts. That berry center is just shooting berry filling everywhere. It's crazy. I was hearing Barry Center too. You know what I've been doing with donuts? I've been enjoying just like a plain

glazed recently. It's the classic. It's such a delicious classic. Unless it was made in the last 25 minutes, you're just wasting your time. Or a blueberry case? Yeah, that's good, yeah. So anyway, so we found charn.

You could get an apple fritter. Why wouldn't you just get an apple fritter? Oh, good. Oh, thank you, Heath. Thank you, Heath. This is Danish gate all over again. Apple fritter. No, I'd happily eat all the foods we just mentioned.

Very happy. Those are all very good. So, okay, so we found char on and we were like, hey, that's cool. And that was it for Pluto until, like, 1992, when David Jewett and Jane Lou discovered 1992 QB1, the first Kip. Superbell object or KBO that wasn't Pluto. They would go on to discover another one the following year, and within another decade, they'd be fighting KBOs so big that we would have to name them.

Those would be things like ERIS, Maki, Maki, Humea, and the losingest scrabble hand ever, Quawar. And yes, I know ERIS isn't technically a KBO, but there isn't room in this show to talk about the scattered disc, you fucking nerds. You've embarrassed yourself. So many of you have. embarrassed yourself. We'd hate to get to in the weeds. Yeah, I don't want to get nerdy in this episode. But following Pluto's leads, I guess they're all named after underworld gods

from around the world. These objects in the belt that they orbit around were named the Kuiper belt after Gerard Kuyper, the Dutch American astronomer, that first proposed its existence in 1951. Oh, no, I'm sorry, no, I just looked this up. Pluto actually first appeared alongside Mickey in 1930. I'm not sure what you're on about with the rest of this, most because I'm not paying any attention at all. Yeah, you can't hear it, but he's doing that bouncy ball on a paddle thing. I've got it pretty good at it. I also play cup and stick during these.

I play cup and stuff. He's bad at it. The thing that's worse is he's bad at. I don't think he's gotten higher. You can get higher than cup and stick. Cup and stick. That's like stick and hoop and ball and cup, but like he took a hybrid and did like one of a good game.

It's a good. I don't even know what you're talking. I don't need it. He sounds crazy. Actually. Kodom. Maybe Kandima. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, of course. To this point, we didn't really know anything about Pluto itself, right? We didn't even know what fucking color it was. Everybody assumed it was white because it'd be icy as all fuck out there. But even the best telescopes that we had, even the best ones that we have today, that are earthbound aren't powerful or even that are orbiting the Earth, they're not powerful to see more than a few pixels when they're pointed at Pluto.

But that would start to change right about the time that we started finding Pluto's neighbors because in 1992, JPL scientist Robert Steele famously called Clyde Tombaugh, who was 86 years old by then and asked for permission to visit his planet. Clyde thought about it and said he was welcome to it, though he warned him it would be a long, cold trip. And then he was like, yeah, I fucking know, man. I'm a JPL scientist. But that conversation served as sort of the unofficial start date of NASA's New Horizons mission, which would conduct the first flyby of Pluto in July of 2015. Now, like most NASA missions, this one almost didn't happen several times. and for the first 10 years, it was just a constant holding pattern as different ideas got

kicked around, funded, and defunded. And by 2001, they'd settled on the basic outlines of the New Horizon submission. And then they cut the funding for it. But then they got it back. And in January of 2006, after several launch delays, it lifted off from Cape Canaveral. A few burns and drop stages later, and it was traveling 36,373 miles per hour. That's 58,536 kilometers an hour, making it the fastest object ever launched from the earth. It would also hold the record for the fastest of spacecraft traveled until the Parker Solar Probe outran it in 2023. Yeah, there's actually a really inspiring video of New Horizons, just fucking flying,

but then it like tears its hamstring and its dad has to come out, help it along. It's inspiring stuff. It is, it is. It bring a tear to your eye. Beautiful. Now, I'm guessing most people don't have an intuitive sense of how fast 36,000 miles per hour is. It helps.

Yeah, that's, it is. It's that fast. it's like, now, now, now, yeah, right. So with New Horizons passed the moon's orbit about nine hours after its launch. Okay, it took Apollo astronauts three fucking days. And it continued to haul ass, right?

It continued to haul ass all the way to Jupiter. It passed there in 2007. It got a gravity assist that added even more speed and allowed it a chance to test out some of its equipment measuring Jovian moons. And then, like, if you want to consider a real good indicator of how the fuck far away Pluto is. This spacecraft is tear an ass through the solar system at record speeds.

It gets to Jupiter a year after it's launched, and then it would take another eight years to get to Pluto, going faster. Now, of course, pretty much immediately after New Horizons launched, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. And suddenly, a bunch of motherfuckers I could not pay to give a fuck about a space essay the day before had emotionally charged opinions on planetary categorization all over the fucking world.

And what that meant is that nine years later, when New Horizons finally made its flyby, there were an inordinate number of huge Pluto fans out there, way more than there would have been had it not gotten demoted. Man, Pluto started way better on vinyl. It was meant to be played on vinyl. That's what they recorded it for. So the first close-up picture of Pluto was released to the public

on July 15th of 2015, I still remember where I was. And as I'm sure you all recall, those pictures were stunning. I came. Like most people, right? Yes, thank you. Like most people were expecting an absolute snowball of a planet just covered in ice and looking like a place that would freeze your taunton before it reached the first marker. But what we actually saw instead was this beautiful salmon-colored world with hints of blues

and yellows and oranges and distinct geological zones that you could make. out from 10,000 miles up. And, of course, a giant undeniably heart-shaped feature smeared across its face like it was telling us to like and subscribe. Pluto's on live on TikTok asking us for galaxies.

Yeah, right? Great picks, Pluto, much hotter than expected. Do you do custom stuff? Tom gets some. But the mission returned a lot more than just unexpectedly pretty pictures. It also sent back terabytes of

data that could also help us tackle the fundamental mystery at the heart, so to speak, of Pluto. Where the fuck did it come from? See, for a while, astronomers thought it, well, no, no, doesn't count. So for a while, astronomers thought it was an escaped Neptuneian moon. Thank you. There it is. But the math doesn't work out on the Neptunian moon thing. No matter how far back you rewind their orbits, Neptune and Pluto were never remotely close to each other. In fact, the truth actually goes the other way. It's now believed that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, is actually a captured Kuiperbell.

Get the fuck out of here. So what is Pluto? Damn. Well done, sir. So what is Pluto? Well, it's actually a lot like a comet. According to the wiki, if you were to place Pluto close enough to the sun, it would develop

a tail like a comet. Though the next sentence calls that into question given Pluto's escape velocity. But in terms of basic structure. It appears to be a lot like a giant comet with an orbit that's eccentric as hell for a planet, but damn near circular for a comet. And the working theory that's most favored right now, as I understand it, as a fake expert, is that Pluto is what happens when a fuck ton of comets all crash into each other. And apparently, all those comets were just chunks that would have formed a planet of their own if Neptune hadn't elbowed its way into their

would-be orbit from closer in. So, despite the general tendency to classify Pluto and its ilk as trans-Neptunian, they were there first. Neptune should be considered Trans-Cyperian, damn it. That's right. This show isn't afraid to get controversial. All right. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? That I can, too, make it all the way through a space episode without having to wake Tom up.

It'll just be asleep through a lot. He ends up all in the comments. Oh, hey, I'm sticking some. All right. And are you ready for the quiz? I'm always ready for nerdy space shit. All right, Noah. It's obvious from this essay that the best way to make people care about space

is with a little bit of drama. So what lie should science tell next to further its goals? Oh, interesting. A, the boson Hicks particle is shaped like a dick. B, the Hubble telescope is searching for alien boobs. Or C, Mars is on suicide watch and really needs us to be up there for it right now. Oh, but definitely C, definitely C.

It is the correct. It knows Elon Musk is coming. Noah, there should be a game show where the solar system objects can peat to become planets. What should it be called? A. Trial and arrow. B. To whom do I.

The honor. C. That's so good. That's the best. D. Most amazing planet. Fantastic. D.

Oh, it's so good. The World Series. Jesus. Dude, it's got to be secret answer E, all of the above. Those are the most amazing goddamn answers you've ever done on this shit show. Thank you.

I loved this so much. Thank you. I saw this in the fucking notes beforehand, and I just fell in love. I had to start messaging little hearts to say so that. I promise to laugh at your jokes next time. I promise.

Okay. You should make this a shirt. Just Eli and Mars up there. Ha! fucking got you, motherfucker! I heard you. Hey, Tom, do you have a question? Hey, oh, shit. Okay, all right, I got it.

Tom, hurt yourself. Hurt yourself again. All right, I'm awake, I'm awake. Noah, you missed most of the really interesting stuff about Pluto. It's weird. Which of the following is the best fun fact you didn't tell us about Pluto? A, Pluto was originally a jackboot of the prison industrial complex, having been drawn as a bloodhound, whose job was to track Mickey after the mouse escaped from a chain gang. Strimon.

B, Pluto received an Academy Award in 1942 for his role in the animated short, Lenda Paw. Or C, Pluto was originally Minnie's dog, but became Mickey's pal as Pluto gained popularity because even cartoon women can't have nice. things. Oh, interesting. I'm going to go with secret answers, both A and C, but not B, because I have to be wrong for the whole thing to work. That's probably all of them, but yeah,

you're wrong. I wasn't paying attention to your answer either. Tom, nicely done, you won stick up, and you stumped Noah. You win both. All right. Let's have an essay from Eli. It's been a minute. All right. Well, for Tom, Noah, Noah, Sinclair, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back. next week, and Eli will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Asterisk. Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, the No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dads, God Offa, Movies, The Scathing Atheist, The Skeptocrat, and D&D Minus. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons,

you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citationpod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media or take a look at show notes. Check out citationpod.com. And that's when I realized I had discovered a brand new particle. I don't know, Chris. And I could blame it after my dog, boson. You know what?

Why not? Let's do it. He was driving the truck that squished my wife. Yeah, no, we saw the news. Spoozed her so bad. I know. Are we going to celebrate her? Why, man?

Because you found a new planet. To Debbie. To Debbie. To Debbie. She got squashed her back. Jesus. What we do it again? Jesus Christ.

See, you laugh when it's his joke. Uh, yeah. Amazing.